Press Release

Outcome, A Novel: There’s More Than a Hurricane Coming …

Compelling Fiction about the convergence of lives and the battered dog who escapes the blowing sand and gusty winds by Barbara Ebel, the physician-turned-author.

Sparta, TN, August 16, 2011 --(PR.com)-- Hurricane Ivan roars. Karen Puno plans and packs and scrambles to flee. The wind whips and sand blasts her car as she descends the beach bridge with her Labrador Retriever.

But up ahead, Karen has more to fear than the monstrous storm behind her.

First, there was the Oscar-winning Best Picture, Crash; now there’s Outcome, A Novel, where lives converge after a hurricane and what lies after the wreckage. Novelist Barbara Ebel brings her vivid characters in from Indiana to Peru, and warms our hearts with the back story and chaos to befall the protagonist’s white dog. Outcome, A Novel: There’s more than a hurricane coming… is readily available at Amazon.com and as an ebook with the Kindle store and Nook.

“As Hurricane Ivan slams through the Gulf,” Novelist Ebel mentions, “and panic-striken Karen Puno packs and scrambles to flee with her dog, it’s not the storm which she needs to worry about, but what lies ahead. Just like life, all the planning in the world won’t help you with what you can’t control.”

Like Barbara Ebel’s highly reviewed novel, Operation Neurosurgeon: You never know…who’s in the OR, she skillfully weaves medicine into the background of her plot. “However,” she says, “my storylines and characters are my primary focus. It’s just that I am a retired anesthesiologist so I deliver credible, interesting medicine in the subplots, particularly when it comes to the OR.”

In Outcome, it’s not just the OR. With her pilot husband’s aeronautical advice, she delivers a gripping first chapter in which tension mounts in a cockpit in Kentucky while the weather worsens. A feisty female pilot aborts her unusual takeoff, jeopardizing her passenger’s task to harvest a comatose woman’s organs for transplant.

“The diversity of lives in this novel is what’s so compelling,” she says. “A police officer on the Gulf Coast is riddled with grief. A worried husband in Peru receives dreadful news and a deserving woman in Indiana is given a second chance. And in the seriousness of an operating room?” She smiles. “An astute anesthesiologist works behind the scenes while a surgeon is nearly negligent.”

Doctor Barbara stops to consider. “There’s even a budding romance when two college students meet due to their mothers’ fates. They must face the hurricane’s devastation together and search for the battered dog who escaped the crushed metal pile into the blowing sand and gusty winds.”

Barbara Ebel lives in a protected wildlife corridor in Tennessee with her husband and has also written and illustrated a much-beloved children’s book series called Chester the Chesapeake. Chester is the author’s own therapy dog who inspires good behavior in children.

What can we expect next from her?

Outcome, A Novel: There’s more than a hurricane coming … can be found at Amazon.com as a paperback and Kindle eBbook, and at B&N, the Nook and other on-line sites.